Michael & Alex Smith

Case background and investigation

Michael Daniel Smith, aged three, and Alexander Tyler Smith, aged 14 months, died on October 25, 1994 in John D. Long Lake near Union, South Carolina. Their mother, Susan Smith, told police that evening that a Black man had taken her car at gunpoint and driven away with both boys still in the back seat. According to CBS News, she kept to that account for nine days while a widely publicized search took place and she made public appeals for the children's return.

On November 3, 1994, ABC News reports, investigators confronted Smith and she confessed. She said she had let her car, a Mazda Protégé according to Wikipedia, roll down a boat ramp into the lake with the two boys fastened into their car seats. CBS News reports that the investigation later established the car took about six minutes to go under. The man she had described did not exist, and the false report was widely criticized for the suspicion it had directed at Black residents of the area.

Smith was tried in 1995. Prosecutors, led by Tommy Pope, sought the death penalty. According to CBS News, their case was that she killed her sons because she believed they stood in the way of a relationship with the son of a wealthy local business owner, who had ended the affair. Wikipedia's account says that he had written to her that he did not want children, and that her lawyers, David Bruck and Judy Clarke, argued that she suffered from depression and a dependent personality disorder.

Fox News reports that the jury convicted Smith of two counts of murder on July 22, 1995. The jurors declined to impose a death sentence and she received life in prison. Under the South Carolina law in force at the time, she became eligible to apply for parole after serving 30 years. She is held at Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood.

Smith's first parole hearing was held on November 20, 2024, when she appeared by video link. The boys' father, David Smith, and the trial prosecutor both asked the board to refuse release. The board voted unanimously to deny parole, citing the nature and seriousness of the crime and her record of offenses in prison, which according to ABC News includes sexual contact with corrections officers and drug possession. Fox News reports that in October 2025 she was found to have broken prison rules by communicating with a documentary filmmaker. She may reapply every two years, and her next hearing has been reported as scheduled for November 19, 2026.